


gracefully on the chin

by irnan



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2016-09-22
Packaged: 2018-08-16 15:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8106745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: One of them always seems to end up breaking a bone or three. It's probably karma.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently the way to work out your feelings about the plot of a thing you're working on is to write another thing where your faves get beaten up a lot, just because.

**I.**

There were two things the Winter Soldier had never tolerated very well. The big one was incompetence. People who’d failed him on some level tended to suffer for it: he had no patience for fools and dealt with them harshly. Karpov had favoured summary executions, which – you could always tell – the Soldier had considered frankly wasteful: for his part, he had an impressive collection of invective, a vicious tongue, and, when it was really bad, a willingness to leave the idiot in question on the floor with a collection of broken bones and impressive lacerations that drove the point home and usually deflected Karpov’s attention for long enough that summary executions were avoided entirely.

Summary executions not being an issue in an organisation nominally run by one Captain Steve Rogers, and Sergeant Bucky Barnes of the Howling Commandos not being much of a one for corporal punishment in any case, that left the invective and the impressively vicious tongue. It had all made much more sense to Natasha once she’d properly realised that James really had been a Sergeant, and furthermore that he’d earned that rank the hard way long before Abraham Erskine had ever laid eyes on Steve.

Not to put too fine a point on it, she found it really fucking hot.

Be that as it may. The _really_ big one, the thing that tipped her darling over into blind fury in the space between one heartbeat and the next, was people harming those he was responsible for. It provoked him into retaliation which was swift and icily well-executed and, on special occasions, considerably more vicious than the original plan had ever been. Their handlers had taken a long time to pick up on this disgustingly human trait because it could usually be sublimated into anger at incompetence, but if you knew him and you knew what to look for it was blindingly obvious.

Natasha had noted with a certain satisfaction that Steve had been neither surprised nor disturbed by either of these tendencies. Steve wasn’t disturbed about the special occasions, either. Nor was Natasha herself. As a rule, she _was_ the special occasion. She’d been watching her Soldier break people for hurting her since the Fifties, and – again, not to put too fine a point on it – she found that really fucking hot, too.

As it turned out, watching James Barnes break people for hurting her hit all the exact same buttons. It was good to know that some things never changed, life to life to life. Delightful, even. She wanted to go over to him and put her hands all over him and purr.

Or she would, if everything didn’t hurt so damn much.

Three broken ribs; her mouth was bruised and her lips split where they’d hit her; her left arm was dislocated, throbbing more angrily than her ribs, even – as long as she didn’t breathe too hard she could ignore them just fine. The cigarette burns on her right arm stung like hell, the fabric of her shirt rubbing at the wounds. She wasn’t all that sure she didn’t have a broken foot. Possibly two.

When she spoke she sounded like she’d been gargling ground glass. “Is the girl all right?” Rollins shoved the muzzle of the gun against her temple, snarling, making her head loll; she couldn’t quite keep her neck stiff, and her throat was probably rainbow-coloured by now.

“Perfectly safe,” James promised.

“Stop fucking moving,” Rollins grated. Natasha couldn’t see – he was standing behind the chair he’d sat her in, his free hand clenched brutally on her injured shoulder – but he sounded nervous, all right.

James said lazily, “Or what?”

“Or she fucking dies!”

“Right. And then what do you think is gonna happen to you?” James’ pale eyes flicked over the room: the dried blood and vomit on the floor, the rope dangling from the ceiling hook where they’d had Natasha suspended by her wrists, her boots and jacket and weapons flung into a corner. The place stank, and Rollins stank even worse, sweating with fear. But there was a door behind him, and if he could hold James off for long enough he might yet make it out, especially if he had a hope of someone coming for him.

“I’ll give you a hint,” she rasped helpfully. “Nothing good.”

“Fuck you,” said Rollins. “Barton not up to scratch anymore, huh? The vintage model got a bigger dick?”

Oh he was anxious all right. You could hear it, even through the sneer. Waiting for someone? Yes. There were footsteps in the corridor behind the door… Natasha went up on her tiptoes. God it hurt, but she could do it, she could tip the chair back. James had seen her movement; he blinked.

“He never did break my record,” he said.

“ _What_ ,” said Rollins, strained.

“Marksmanship. Barton never broke my record before he got his discharge.”

“I’ve always been gone for a guy with a rifle,” Natasha said sweetly, and hissed through her teeth when Rollins squeezed her shoulder harder yet. Agony ran up her arm and side and stabbed at her, and for a moment her vision went black. Then, behind them, footsteps, the sound of a gun being unholstered…

She flung herself backwards. The back of the chair drove into Rollins’ stomach, and she heard him gasp as all the breath in his body was driven out of him. The gun jumped in his hand and went off, she felt the passage of the bullet in front of her face, and god god don’t let it have hit James _don’t_. When they hit the floor her whole body was jolted, and she couldn’t help a scream – Rollins had dropped the gun when he hit the floor and wrapped his hands around her throat instead – there was a shout and a gunshot and someone collapsed to the floor, and then, as her breath came short and her vision went black again, James standing over them, gun in his hand –

The gunshot was deafening. Something hot splattered across the side of her face. She was panting, gasping. James snapped the cuffs holding her right wrist to the arm of the chair and pulled Rollins’ slack dead hands off her; then he lifted her gently into his lap and rocked her as she got her breath back, murmuring nonsense and endearments into her ear. Tomorrow she would feel bad for putting him in a position where he had to kill to protect her. Tomorrow. 

“What’s broken?” he said at last.

“Everything.” Natasha pressed her aching face against the leather of his jacket, groaning. “Dislocated shoulder.”

“OK. OK.” He kissed her temple. “You really gotta stop this, sweetheart.”

“They knew where she was, we didn’t.”

“You really gotta stop this,” he said again. He didn’t mean it. She would do whatever needed doing to get the job done – so would he – and a beating was a minor thing to endure compared to the life of a child. His hands on her were gentle as he checked her over, and Natasha slid off his lap and turned her back to him, wordlessly asking him to pop her shoulder back in.

The pain swallowed up her whole body. Safe with him at last, she let herself scream for the first time since this had started, then slumped back into his arms, gasping. The throbbing had changed – still hurt like hell, but there was no longer the odd sense of wrongness to it; now she was just sore.  

“What did you do to that poor analyst?”

He scowled. “The one who messed up the drop?”

“No broken bones,” she said firmly.

“No, Steve was watching.”

That made her laugh, which made her ribs hurt, which made her cling to him and sob, just a little, just because he was here and she was safe and she got to, when they were alone.

“Ready to leave?”

“Definitely.” God it hurt when he lifted her. Slow steady steps, careful not to jolt her, avoiding the pools of blood and the bodies in the corridor. Only one of them was still conscious, whimpering but motionless. James ignored him. Out here in the corridor she could hear the fighting – or the clean-up? – going on in the upper levels of the building, the noise getting louder as James made for the stairwell.

“Hey,” he said softly. “They’ll all know.”

Yes, they would – they probably already did, what with the corpses, and how he’d come to find her, and she knew exactly what mood he must have been in, the last two days. That poor analyst would have caught it, for a start. Natasha drew a breath. Endless, endless questions, the entire kindergarten poking their noses into the last seventy years of their lives, all how and when and how come and what were you thinking and why didn’t you tell us. All their precious, fiercely-guarded, long-dreamed-of privacy gone.

Weighed against that, the simple pleasure of having him carry her out of here and hold her, and she knew exactly what look he’d turn on anyone who crossed the line, and it wasn’t like Steve and Clint didn’t both already know.

“Good,” she said, and pressed her aching filthy face into the crook of his neck.

Softly – but with very great finality – James said, “Good.”

 

**II.**

The shockwave from the blast flung him halfway across the floor of the parking garage, and Bucky thought he heard his ribs and skull crack on impact with the concrete wall; there was a sickening noise that seemed to come from somewhere inside him, and then black.

It was probably only a few minutes later that he came back to himself; the air was choked and cloudy with dust, making every breath gross at best and painful at worst, and he could hear the concrete slipping and falling and crunching above and around him. He seemed to be in a more or less stable hole, dumped like one of Emmy’s rag dolls across a slope of rubble that was digging into his back and ass. When he tried to shift a dull throbbing soreness in his leg flared into pain. Bucky groaned; that meant nothing good. Fumbling for his flashlight, he raised his head and switched it on, squinting through the dust, trying to make out…

His whole body had been coated in grey, but the hole in his leg was a viscous, wet dark red. Meat of his thigh, it looked like, and – yeah, the metal was underneath him, that was the top of some sort of… piping, he supposed, perfectly round and solid in the wound.

Well fuck.

Stark had probably done it on purpose. Ah, that was unfair. The man was trying. (Very trying.) But all guilt aside, sometimes Bucky was just sick and fucking tired of having to apologise for his own damn brainwashing, for seven straight decades of agony…

He didn’t have a med kit on him, but he could unzip his jacket, pull the long-sleeved t-shirt up and cut his undershirt off his chest so he could at least get a tourniquet around his leg. His hands weren’t quite steady, and he nicked himself with the knife once or twice before he had enough ripped undershirt in his lap to do what he needed to. The ruins around him were settling, though he thought he heard shouts and voices and helicopters in the distance; his own breathing was about the loudest thing in the vicinity. It was dark down here even after the dust began to settle, and he held the flashlight in his teeth as he knotted the cloth round his leg.

What a mess. Long practice let him block the pain away, wall off a part of his mind and leave it there to throb dully, a distant background to the rest of his thoughts. Sometimes, when he was hurt like this, he found himself wondering what Becca would have done; he’d never seen her at it, in her element: Doctor Rebecca Barnes, M.D… It still hurt that he hadn’t been there – that he’d not fought with his Dad over who’d walk Emmy down the aisle, or given Sarah Jane a present for her twenty-first birthday.

The question was, did he dare try and get that thing out of his leg without access to a med kit, or being sure when they’d find him. The comms were down, unsurprisingly… Bucky thought that on the whole he’d rather not risk bleeding out in this dump. He’d got tickets for tomorrow for Tasha for a ballet she liked, and she’d never forgive him if she had to go alone because he was dead. It would ruin the ballet for her for ever.

Tasha. Natalia. He slumped back against the rubble slope, sighing. Thinking of her was a much more pleasant way to pass the time than literally any other option he had down here… thinking of her was a much more pleasant way to pass the time than most other options he had anywhere, short of being with her. Bucky smiled to himself. Her smile, and that soft warm laugh that only he ever heard, and how gracefully she moved: on the dancefloor, in a fight… no one but Natalia could make that brutality beautiful.

Her cold feet in bed every night of his life, and the way she _never_ bothered to tidy up the kitchen before she went to bed. Bucky couldn’t stand coming downstairs in the morning to a filthy kitchen, all the dishes strewn about, empty wine bottle on the counter; it depressed him for the rest of the day. She would find him. She’d find him long before Steve did, even. If only the comms weren’t down. It wrung his heart to think he might be worrying her – they had spent enough time being afraid for one another. Afraid of one another, too. Her face that day the triggers had been wiped away, the hesitance and the hope she couldn’t keep out of her smile... how good it had been to take her in his arms, and promise her he was hers forever, and know that no one would ever be able to make him break his word to her again.

Stone and scree skittered near his head; he was half asleep, his eyes closed, and he jerked back to full awareness painfully, uncomfortably cold, and stiff enough that he couldn’t keep the agony in his leg out of his mind anymore; he gasped, groping for his sidearm and hoping it wasn’t too clogged with dust to function –

Small strong hands in ripped up leather gloves touched him, a ghostly half-a-face leaning over his body. Bucky stared up at it blankly for several long seconds before he realised that those lovely green eyes were his love’s, and that she’d wrapped some kind of scarf across the lower half of her face to keep the dust out.

“You look like you’ve crawled off a horror movie set,” he croaked.

Her startled cackle of laughter was muffled by the cloth. Her gloves were fingerless like his own, and when she reached up to pull the scarf down he saw blood on her fingertips.

“I’d apologise for scaring you, but for five whole seconds I honestly thought you might be dead.”

“Not me, darling. I’d miss you too much.”

Natasha bent over him, laughing, wet-eyed with relief; their noses brushed, and she kissed him gently, dust-coated as he was. “What have you done to yourself.”

“Nothing good,” Bucky said ruefully. “Hurts like fuck.”

“I’m not carrying you out of here, dearest, I’m sorry to say,” Natasha said, and he laughed tiredly as she checked his leg, biting her lip. She’d brought water, and Bucky gulped thirstily; the remainder she poured over his leg, trying to wash the dust and dirt from the wound. Then she crawled back up and settled behind him, her legs splayed at either side of his hips, cradling him close. Her arms went round his shoulders, and he felt her kiss his hair. She must have begun to eel her way between the concrete slabs and the teetering walls before the dust had started to settle; she’d been on the street seven stories below him when the blast hit… her uniform was ripped at the knees, bloody scrapes showing.

“God I love you,” he said tiredly.

“Ah, we’re not even on the waterfront.” She made it light, cheerful, teasing.

“Now you’ve said that there’ll be a burst waterpipe somewhere.”

“Shush. That’s borrowing trouble.”

“You started it.” He laughed at her, and then started coughing; she held him up as best she could, her arms around his shoulders. The coughing fit made him dizzy, his vision blurring; be a miracle if he turned out not to have a concussion. At last he fell back against her chest, his head on her shoulder, breathing hard.

“Easy,” Natasha murmured. “Easy. Not much longer. Pass out if you like. Steve’s coming for us.”

“I know,” Bucky said. “I know.”

 

**III.**

“It’s not as if she did it on purpose,” said Steve.

“Of course she did,” said Bucky, dropping his end of the mattress and glaring. “God forbid that woman help move her own fecking furniture into her own apartment.”

“I can hear you,” Natasha sing-songed from the living room. She was enthroned on the couch in the middle of the room with her broken leg propped on the newly-unpacked coffee table – it was still sitting on a bed of cardboard – and a box of books under her left elbow; in her right hand she was swinging the kitchen scrub brush that had fallen out of the box with the coffee maker, using it to conduct the moving-in: this box there, that shelf unit here.

Steve laughed. “Remember your place in Sheepshead Bay?”

“With the bathtub in the kitchen and the couch that wobbled.” Bucky smiled too.

“This couch,” Natasha called out, “does not wobble. It’s very comfortable, actually.”

“I always wondered where you got that thing,” said Steve. “It was awful.”

“Mary Steinberg gave it me for services rendered,” said Bucky.

Steve wrinkled his nose the way he’d always used to do if he came round the corner into the back of the shop and found Bucky kissing one of his girlfriends in the shadow of the wall out of his mother’s line of sight. “Gross.”

Bucky threw a pillow at him. “I _mean_ I did the accounts for her for the shop after Jake ran off with whatsherface, the Reagan girl,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” Steve grinned.

“I believe you, darling,” Natasha said comfortingly. “I’d give you a couch for services rendered.”

Bucky and Steve looked at each other.

“It’s the painkillers,” Bucky said.

“It is not,” Natasha said. “It’s your mouth. I’m very fond of it.”

“It’s _definitely_ the painkillers,” Bucky said. But he was kind of enjoying the way Steve had gone red, he had to admit. When they went back out into the living room Natasha was slumped in the cushions, looking up at them; she did seem a little woozy, it had to be said. Her eyes were bright, and her face was flushed. Bucky leaned over to check her temperature, and she smiled at him.

“I’m fine.”

“Uh-huh.” He leered at her a little, and she laughed helplessly. She did feel a bit warm… it’d be typical if she came down with something as soon as she was injured, tension snapped and no reason to force herself to stay healthy. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll make the bed, and then you can sleep.”

“So you can re-arrange _my_ kitchen to _your_ liking? I’m on to you, Sergeant.” She poked him with the scrub brush.

“When was the last time you cooked anything more complicated than scrambled eggs?”

Natasha thought about it. “It can’t have been that long ago.”

“Sure.” Bucky squatted in front of the couch. “I really do think you’re maybe coming down with something.”

She made a wry face. “It’d be typical, wouldn’t it.”

“It kind of would.” He thought about it. “Chicken soup?”

“Very traditional.”

“Hey, we’re over a hundred years old.”

“Yeah, let’s not forget that, Romanov.” Steve was grinning as he joined them; he transferred the box of books from the couch to the coffee table and sat down in its place, where Natasha promptly misappropriated him for a cushion.

“Hah,” she said. “You make the bed. Send the errand boy for chicken soup.” She waved the scrub brush at Steve imperiously, and then frowned at it as if she’d forgotten why she’d picked it up in the first place.

“Demoted, Rogers,” Bucky said.

“He’s been resenting it that I outrank him for seventy straight years,” Steve told Natasha confidentially.

“I don’t resent that you outrank me,” said Bucky. “I resent it that you didn’t earn that ridiculous promotion.”

“Only saved his life,” Steve agreed.

“That’s not worth a promotion, it’s just a Thursday,” said Bucky, dismissive.

“Imagine if he hadn’t,” Natasha said. “Who’d move all my furniture for me?”

Bucky shook his head at her; she blew him a kiss, laughing.

 

**IV.**

Natasha knew quite well that she was hovering like a mother hen, but she couldn’t quite seem to help herself. Scott was considerably more careful than their handlers had ever been, but the fact was, there wasn’t much difference between poking a screwdriver into James’ left arm and stabbing his right one, and she hated seeing him in pain. He kept it off his face if you were a total stranger, or an idiot, but Natasha had loved him for decades and knew perfectly well what the lines around his eyes meant, the stubbornly immobile mouth. The pulse had been designed to knock out all the tech in the vicinity – thank god Scott had not been shrunk and Sam and Rhodey had been on the ground – and though it hadn’t been as powerful as they’d feared it had still done a number on James’ prosthetic.

Wanda had caught Tony as he’d toppled out of the sky and let him drop the last two feet with a clatter that had given them all a headache. Wanda could be petty sometimes. But Rhodey had laughed so much that thankfully the argument had been defused before it even started.

“How’s it going?” Steve, covered in dust and with an impressive purpling bruise swelling his jaw. He sounded as anxious as Natasha felt.

“Fine,” James said, at the same time as Scott said, “Not fatal but gotta replace this and that’ll take a sec,” and Natasha said, “Med leave –”

“I don’t need med leave.”

“If you’d broken your arm –”

“That’s not how this one works.”

“The point is –”

“Stop _worrying_.” Uncharacteristically patronising and exasperated, as if she were some groupie wringing her hands over him whose attentions were deeply unwelcome.

“Oh go fuck yourself.” That was an exclamation even Natasha hadn’t expected of herself. Scott looked up and caught Steve’s eye, who grimaced, but neither of them knew if they should make a run for it or not.

James drew a breath. There was a muscle going in his jaw, that tic that meant someone was about to catch the rough side of his tongue. He’d never turned it on Natasha before. When was the last time they’d had a fight? They didn’t even bicker, usually.

The best defence, in Natasha’s extensive experience, was a good offence. She put her hands on her hips. “I saw you go down, you dismissive asshole. You do not get to treat me like an irrational little girl.” The shockwave had knocked him down; the pain and the shock of the suddenly immobile prosthetic had kept him down for long terrible seconds that had dragged by like centuries for her. She drew a breath.

“All right,” James said, not even grudgingly. “Med leave. A week.”

Natasha blinked. “Just like that.”

“I don’t like seeing you upset. I’m sorry.”

Well that was all the wind taken out of her sails at once. She pursed her lips, trying to hide the fact that she was floundering; judging by the curve of his mouth, she wasn’t succeeding.

“Thank you,” she said.

He shrugged a bit with his right shoulder, managing to look apologetic and amused at once. After a minute, Steve said, “If our favourite idiot’s OK, Nat, can I get your help?”

“Of course,” she said, tearing her eyes off James’ face. “I’m sorry. Lay on, Macduff.” She glanced back at James; he blew her a kiss.

“Thanks,” said Steve, and halfway out the door he turned and said, “Ten days,” and closed the door on James’ protests, grinning.

 

**V.**

Bucky hadn’t stirred in two hours. The sunlight through the slats of the blinds had moved down the wall, turning a deeper gold as the evening advanced, and outside in the corridor the shouting and running had died down as the crisis slowly passed, but Natasha hadn’t woken, and the respirator was still breathing for her, a steady, deep, mechanical noise that made him angry. Natalia’s breathing shouldn’t sound like that. If he’d only been quicker… But he hadn’t had a shot in time, and she’d gotten a face full of the powder while trying to keep the Hulk calm, and her throat had closed up as if she’d had an allergic reaction to peanuts. He’d been as helpless to do anything as he had been during any of Steve’s childhood asthma attacks. Holding her while she’d gasped for breath and clawed at her own throat had been –

“Don’t think about it,” he muttered to himself. “Just don’t.” Her poor bandaged hand under his was still and cold and very small. It was moment like this that you remembered that she was neither tall nor broad nor powerfully built – all her presence was personality. Blood loss, bandages, the hideous hospital gown, the contraption over half her face; taken together, she seemed fragile under the fluorescent lights, even her beautiful hair gone dull and lifeless.

There was a step in the corridor, and a knock at the door, which stood ajar; Bucky looked up.

Banner said, “How is she?”

“Fighting,” Bucky said. “Stubborn little witch.”

Banner smiled faintly. “They say she’ll be fine.” He came across the room slowly, as if he were sore all over; Bucky wondered if the transformation left him hurting. It certainly looked painful. Poor bastard. At least the arm didn’t hurt. Bucky liked Banner – anyone who could manage to be so even-handedly disgusted with both Stark and Steve at one and the same time had earned Bucky’s respect, he figured.

“They do.”

“But you’re a pessimist?” Banner stopped by Natasha’s bedside, looking down at her, his face unreadable; then his eyes went to Bucky. For the first time he seemed to realise that Bucky was holding her hand.

“In my experience,” Bucky said, “the worst always happens eventually. You gotta be prepared for it…”

“What is the worst?”

Bucky shrugged. “If she doesn’t wake up, and if her brain activity… turn off the machine, basically.” He shifted. “We’ve been dragged back and forth across the brink of death enough, Natalia and I.” Christ, if it came to that, he'd burn the world down, and then probably eat a bullet. She deserved better, dammit, she deserved every day of torture made up to her a thousand times over, a century of happiness for every bruise and knife wound and gunshot, every drop of blood staining her hands that she'd never wanted to spill. How could someone so alive and so loving and so kind be put through that agony and then just vanish out of the world in a white-walled hospital room with a plastic tube down her windpipe? 

She wouldn't. It wouldn't happen. She would never give up, his Natalia, she would never leave him. They belonged together, in this life and the next.

“I,” said Banner. “Yes. I understand that.”

Bucky looked at him steadily. “It wasn’t your fault, you know.”

“She was trying to keep the Hulk calm,” Banner said. “Or she’d have seen him sooner.”

“Yeah, and I wasn’t quick enough, and Steve let him slip past the line, and blah blah blah.” Bucky waved his left hand. “It was a battlefield. Blame yourself for what you were guilty for, ey?”

Banner said, “I hear you’re good at that.”

Bucky laughed tiredly. “I guess.”

Silence for a moment, save the awful respirator; then suddenly a machine blared into a clamour, and Natasha’s body jerked; she was awake, clawing at the thing over her face, eyes huge and terrified. In a heartbeat Bucky was kneeling over her on the bed, catching her hands before she hurt herself.

“Don’t, Tasha, don’t, you’re safe, I’m here –” Doctors crowding in, orders snapped and people appearing out of nowhere; Bucky kept up a low running litany of comfort until they’d pulled the respirator out of her throat and she was free to cling to him and gasp, rubbing her sore throat.

“There you are. It’s all right, you’re all right.”

“The others,” she croaked.

“Everything went fine.”

“OK.” She hid her face in his chest, the awful rasping unsteady breaths a thousand times lovelier to hear than the machines, and Bucky cradled her and kissed her hair and thought, I’d thank god but he had nothing to do with it, and grinned to himself.

(The next day, when Tasha was getting fed up with the hospital and twitchy enough to try discharging herself before the docs wanted her to, he said, “Hey, I didn’t know you were the Hulk-whisperer.”

“Ah,” Natasha said. “Yes.”

“Huh?”

“Well,” she said, and looked awkward.

“Ohhhhh,” said Bucky. Banner was the guy, the one she’d told him about. Well of course it made sense that it was an Avenger. She trusted so few people, whether her memories were intact or not.

“Yes,” Natasha said. “It’s terrible, I feel like I lied to him.”

“About what?” Bucky blinked.

She gave him a look.

“Oh, come off it.”

“I didn’t say it was rational.”

“We didn’t remember each other,” Bucky said. “I was barely sane, you had a whole… faked life implanted in your head. Exceptional circumstances, is what I’m trying to say.”

She smiled at him, faint but warm. “Barely sane is a bit much.”

“You just saw the highlight reel.”

That made her laugh quietly. “We got pretty far on just the highlight reel.”

“I know,” he said. “Sort of thing that could turn a fella’s head, having the same gorgeous redhead fall for, what, three different versions of him.”

Natasha shook her head, still smiling. She pulled her hand out of his and raised it to his cheek, the bandages a little rough against his skin, her fingers warm, her thumb resting at the corner of his mouth. Bucky turned his head to kiss her hand.)  

 

**VI.**

They’d put his right arm into the restraint, which might have been a strategic mistake, or might have been an attempt to cause him as much pain as possible. He was slumped against it, sort of hanging there; it must be agony on his shoulder. His left arm fizzed and flickered with electric sparks – painful enough – and there was a long awful pool of blood at his feet, where someone had been dragged away from him; as she got closer she could see the blood on his left hand. He’d killed someone then… poor darling. He was barely conscious, his head lolling, and struggling to stay more or less upright as she tore through the room. Ten. Eleven. It didn’t much matter to her, killing, but then, she’d never been a good person, not the way he was.

The twelfth one, the last one, had a broken knee and a crushed right hand and he was scrambling away from her, trying to get at one of the guns his fallen friends had dropped. Natasha stepped over a corpse and wandered over to him, her footsteps very loud on the grating walkway, not even bothering to hurry. She kicked him in the groin, casually, and he curled into a ball and whimpered, sobbing properly when her next kick caught him in the face.

“You lucky bastard,” she murmured. “Just stay down, kiddo. Stay down and remember that I’m leaving you alive because my darling boy hates to see people die unnecessarily.”

The third kick was mostly just to relieve her feelings, because she was a vengeful bitch.

James was breathing hard and shaking, his face bruised and swollen and bloodied; when she put her hands on his face very gently he raised his head, blinking, lovely grey eyes bloodshot.

“Hello, love.”

“You really gotta stop this, sweetheart,” she said gently, and he laughed, the sound too wet for her liking; if they’d driven a broken rib into his lung… what, they were all already dead. Natasha stroked his hair as she went to her knees, ran her hands all over him. Yes, his ribs were bad. Damn them. _Damn_ them. He’d suffered enough, he’d done nothing to deserve this, nothing at all. If she had to carve her way through the population of Mexico City she’d find whoever was responsible for this and make them pay.

Steve would help. James never needed to know.

“Let’s get you out of this thing.”

“Mechanism. Other side.”

“OK. Hang on.” Simple, but too far for him to reach when in the restraint. She snapped it open, and when the lower half of the metal fell away he pitched to his knees, groaning; Natasha almost wasn’t fast enough to catch him. For a few moments he lay slumped in her arms, his head on her shoulder, and she cradled him and kissed the shell of his ear and pictured herself disembowelling the man responsible for this and strangling him with his own intestines. The next person to so much as breathe in his direction in a way she didn’t like was going to get stabbed. “Think you can walk?”

“Think you can carry me?” He tried for a smile.

“Over my shoulder,” she said, grinning. “Like a sack of potatoes.”

“God,” he said, as she pulled his right arm around her shoulders and helped him stand. “This is what I get for bringing you breakfast in bed every Sunday.”

“Sub-par service, I know,” Natasha agreed solemnly. He wasn’t too unsteady, but she could hear the breath hissing through his teeth, and all his weight was on her: not quite the way she liked best to have his arm over her shoulders. Her nose was full of the smell of his sweat and blood, and that would have made her angry too, but he was so much more important. “Just a little further.”

“Really oughta quit this job. It’s a health hazard.”

“You’ll quit when you’re dead,” she said quietly. “There’s too much you can still do.” He looked at her; she smiled at him. “I know you.”

“I guess it’s not true,” he said. “About opposites attracting.”

“We’re plenty opposite, love. What kind of heathen takes their eggs over easy?”

James laughed again, his face relaxing into amusement, and Natasha helped him down the steps and through the doors and home.

 

**VII.**

It took a hell of a lot of brute force to bring both Bucky and Natasha down. It always had done, of course, but if there was one thing even stronger than Hydra’s conditioning, it was Buck’s own innate stubbornness. Natasha wasn’t any different. There had been no one to hold hostage, except each other, and… no. Steve couldn’t see it. His footsteps crunched on the shattered glass from the windscreen and windows as he circled the burnt-out shell of the SUV. They must have known they were transporting the artefact, or they would not have bothered to bring the kind of manpower necessary to…

That meant an inside job. Were the Winter Soldier and the Black Widow the icing on the cake? Or the main target? Of course, if Bucky was the main target they were going to get a nasty shock when the trigger words no longer worked. That wasn’t comforting: it left open the possibility that Bucky would simply be killed, and Tasha with him. Steve’s chest was hollow and his hands were cold. The others couldn’t quite look at him; his jaw was aching where it had been clenched for so long. There was nothing here – skid marks, the ruined vehicle, but nothing that even remotely resembled a lead, and Steve couldn’t –

His phone rang. It cut through his thoughts as harshly as a car alarm, and he pulled it out with clumsy fingers: caller unknown.

“Rogers.”

“Hey man,” said Bucky’s voice. “I’m sorry if we’ve scared you.”

“God!” Steve said explosively. He had to stop there and catch his breath before he spoke again. “Where are you?”

“Somewhere in Germany,” Bucky said. “Not far from Salzburg, I think.”

“That’s Austria,” Steve said blankly, too dumbfounded to get his tongue round any of the questions he should be asking.

“Well the border, you know. But definitely on the German side.”

“How,” Steve demanded, “did you get to Europe from upstate New York in less than three hours?”

“Ah,” Bucky said. “The, uh, the artefact? It teleports you. Ain’t the future great.”

“What the _hell_ ,” Steve said. “But the car, the SUV, I mean are you injured?”

“No, not as such, but, uh, you know, you set off a magic artefact in the middle of a village square on the Austrian border and then have an argument with some of the fellas who tried to steal it from you in the first place, well, it’s not the sort of thing that the German police… appreciate.”

“You’re in gaol,” Steve said, squeezing the bridge of his nose between his finger and thumb.

“I’m afraid so.”

“But uninjured.”

“But very much in gaol.”

“What about Natasha?”

Bucky sounded offended. “Would I be sitting here winding you up like an asshole if she weren’t OK?”

“Why are you winding me up like an asshole,” Steve said, but he didn’t really bother to make it a question.

“You know that move you do when you pinch the bridge of your nose” – Steve dropped his hand from his face at once – “and chew on your bottom lip?”

“No,” said Steve sulkily. He rubbed at his lower lip where he’d been chewing on it.

“Makes you look like your Mom,” said Bucky. “I – hey!” There was a rustle on the line, and then a laugh, and then Natasha’s warm voice.

“Steve, everything OK?”

“Fine,” said Steve. Fine now, at any rate. He scuffed his foot through the broken glass on the road, fighting back a smile. “Anything actually pertinent I need to know?”

“The amount of bail you might be asked to pay,” Natasha said ruefully. “The artefact opened up a kind of crater in the middle of the road, a few people’s cars fell into it. We’re not popular round here.”

“Never been popular up that end of Austria,” said Steve. “Get Bucky to tell you about the time –”

“He already did,” Natasha said, laughing. “I preferred _The Sound of Music_.”

“You hate _The Sound of Music_.”

“It’s on the terrible mission music playlist!”

“Only because I put it back on every time you take it off,” Steve said fondly. “All right, Julie Andrews, I’m coming to get you.”

“Thank you, dearest,” Natasha said.

“Always,” Steve promised.

 

 

 


End file.
